Profiling Web Archive Coverage for Top-Level Domain and Content Language

Abstract: The Memento aggregator currently polls every known public web archive when serving a request for an archived web page, even though some web archives focus on only specific domains and ignore the others. Similar to query routing in distributed search, we investigate the impact on aggregated Memento TimeMaps (lists of when and where a web page was archived) by only sending queries to archives likely to hold the archived page. We profile twelve public web archives using data from a variety of sources (the web, archives' access logs, and full-text queries to archives) and discover that only sending queries to the top three web archives (i.e., a 75% reduction in the number of queries) for any request produces the full TimeMaps on 84% of the cases.